The obvious answer is to take over the insolvent banks, just as we did with the insolvent S&Ls…The point of the exercise is not have the government run the banks, the point is to keep the financial system running without giving even more money to the richest people in the country.

This is the only reasonable solution to the mess that the bankers have created. The other solutions are simply efforts to transfer dollars from hardworking taxpayers to overpaid and incompetent bank executives. It is hard to believe that anyone would take it seriously, if not for the enormous political power of the Wall Street gang.

They have finally given voice to this unholy idea, the notion that we should nationalize the banks. That we should give control of our badly run banks over to what is realistically the most poorly run enterprise of the 21st century – the US Government. Because they could do better.

What strikes me in the discourse is how quickly the media seems to have forgotten the other group of people that got us into this mess. I speak not of the Wall Street fat cats, but rather, the Main Street alley cats. For you see, the banks wouldn’t be having any problems if not for one huge, forgotten, underlying factor – people aren’t paying their bills.

And while it’s easy to imagine the spectre of evil, greedy bankers preying on simple, innocent Americans, coercing them into buying homes they couldn’t afford and putting all of their groceries on their credit card for the past decade, there is probably an easier answer.

Americans spent the past decade spending more money than they had.

Having now run up huge debts at these institutions with no forseeable way to pay them off, we are, through our elected officials, seeking to take them over. So we can forgive the debts. To ourselves.

I’m getting this from a wonderful blog I read daily by Paul Kedrosky. It’s a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote about the banks back in 1819. Picture for you non-clicker’s below (but really, check out his blog).